A Christmas card dating from 1989. The postcard shows a modern drawing of the Tabernacle Chapel on Tabernacle Lane off St James’s Street (also colloquially known as Sheep Street, due to the livestock that used to be offered for sale here from pens arranged along the pavement). There is a reproduction of a letter originally written in 1858 by DR Maurice Phillips, offering himself as a candidate for “the important work of a Missionary to the heathen.” Tabernacle Congregational Chapel was built in1858 to replace the original chapel built in 1815. Originally the chapel was Wesleyan Methodist but by 1890 the chapel had become Congregationalist, and later passed to the United Reformed Church. It is a grade II listed building. Maurice Phillips was born in Llanboidy, Carmarthenshire on 11 April 1839. Following studying at Bedford College, he commenced his ministerial career at Siloa Church, Aberdare and left for Madras in 1861. From 1862 he worked for the London Missionary Society in Salem, Coimbatore and from 1891 in Madras. He retired from missionary work in 1908, returning to Britian. He had married Mary Jane Lechler in 1864 (died 1867) and in 1875 married Mary Collier. They had two daughters. He died in Southport in 1910. In his obituary in the Western Mail (30 August 1810) it was noted that in India “his name was a household word among those who were engaged in the same work as himself”. Regarding the funeral service, the Western Mail (31 August 1910) noted “He brought into the work [of a missionary] the warmth and passion and the great enthusiasm characteristic of the emotional Welsh temperament. He was endowed with special gifts, intellectual and enthusiastic…which enabled him to understand the character of the Hindu religion.” He wrote extensively on India’s religions. In his book The Teaching of the Vedas (1894) he concluded that “the development of religious thought in India has been uniformly downward, and not upward – deterioration, and not evolution.” Christian missionaries were taught to believe that Hinduism was a religion of idolatry, polytheism and superstition and that there was no place for Hindus in heaven, and so were sent out to educate the indigenous populations in Christianity. A pamphlet “Wanted: Intercessory Missionaries for India.“ (The Welsh Mission Press, Shylet) stated that it was seeking to “turn men ‘from idols to serve the living God.’” And the Indian Missionary Manual (1889) quoted Alexander Duff (1806 – 1878), a Scottish missionary in India who wrote “In that vast realm (India0 is the most stupendous fortress and citadel of ancient error and idolatry now in the world…It is defended by three hundred and thirty millions of gods and goddesses – the personations of evils – of types and forms to be paralleled only by the spirits of Pandemonium. Within are congregated two hundred and fifty millions of huma captives, the willing victims of the most egregious ‘falsities and lies’ that have ever been hatched by the Prince of Darkness – pantheisms and atheisms, transcendental idealisms and grovelling materialisms, rationalisms and legends, and all devouring credulities…” In their evangelical fervour for conversion to what they felt was the one true faith - and despite the more positive impacts they had with regards cultural exchange and educational and medical practices - Christian missionaries played their part in attempting to subjugate the cultural identities of indigenous populations, promote cultural imperialism and impose Western values and practices at the expense of indigenous cultures.